Scientific evaluation by peer review

In his essay on peer review in the 18th century scientific journalism, David Abraham Kronick (1) pointed out that „ peer review is an essential and integral part of consensus building and is inherent and necessary to the growth of knowledge”. Editorial peer review, however, was far from being a well established institution back at Mendel’s time (2). It is obvious that peer review only really became institutionalized after World War II. In the course of the post-World war II science boom it became an accepted practice and it reached the height of its power in the US. There the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health were established and famous magazines, like Science, improved their peer review practices. Along with the institutionalization of peer review, its functionalities changed from a discursive consensus building tool, as it had existed ever since, to a decision making tool that affected research funding and publication decisions. The forms of expert review have multiplied during the last century. Without being a standardized practice, peer review is most commonly defined as „the evaluation of scientific research findings or proposals for competence, significance and originality, by qualified experts who research and submit work for publication in the same field (peers)”.